Today's Mudline

December 9, 2016

Donald Trump tweet on SNL: "Unwatchable! Totally biased, not funny...sad."....Response tweet from Danielle Muscato: "Jesus f***ing Christ. You are the president-elect. Pick your f***ing battles, man. You're embarrassing yourself."....Sarah Palin on Trump's Carrier deal: "Crony capitalism."....Kellyanne Conway on Dems: "A bunch of crybabies and sore losers."....Sean Hannity on Dems: "Their sub-par, crooked, corrupt candidate lost."....Seth McFarlane on Trump: "[Hollywood people] learned to recognize the blustery showmanship of a lying con man because we encounter it every day in our business."....Trump's lawyers on Michigan recount: "Lawless, insulting...Farce."....CA Secretary of State Alex Padilla on Trump fraud claims: "Absurd. His reckless tweets are inappropriate and unbecoming of a president-elect."....Bernie Sanders on Trump's voter fraud claims: "Disgraceful and unfounded nonsense."....Mark Hamill on Trump staff and cabinet appointees and candidates: "A who's-who of really despicable people."....Asawin Suebsaeng on Trump: "Behaves as if he were a nightmarish caricature dreamed up by some bored ACLU staffers."....Trump on Sen. Elizabeth Warren: "Just a terrible person. Everybody in the Senate hates her."....Rep. Chris Collins on Mitt Romney: "A self-serving egomaniac."....Newt Gingrich: "You have never, ever in your career seen a serious adult who's wealthy, independent, has been a presidential nominee, suck up at the rate that Mitt Romney is sucking up."....Jon Stewart on Trump: "[Said Hillary Clinton] was an unqualified Secretary of State because of the way she handled classified material. His selection for Secretary of State will be David Petraeus, who pled guilty to mishandling classified material. He said she was unqualified because she gave a speech to Goldman Sachs. His Secretary of the Treasury is somebody from Goldman Sachs. We're in post-accountability."....

Daily Briefing

Deep buzz for the content-deprived

Every weekday, while you get showered and dressed, we pluck these dewy-
fresh, breaking stories from the info-clogged byways of the datasphere.
Pour yourself a cup of coffee and stoke up on everything you need to know,
or at least enough to fake it.

We’re thinking that a diktat will soon come around from the schoolmarms and ayatollahs of All Things Hip, declaring that “Linsanity” is already passé, overdone, uncool.

For now, though, we’re staying with it, especially because the remarkable Jeremy Lin won a game for the New York Knicks on Tuesday night, draining a three-pointer just before the buzzer. Nothing but net. Hotter than Tiger Balm...

This is a perennial question. The truth, of course, is that Apple is neither. Apple is an experience company. That they create both hardware and software is part of creating the entire product experience...

Connoisseurs of low farce and political absurdity have reason to be disappointed with Donald Trump. The real estate mogul's flirtation with running for the Republican Party's presidential nomination was a grand, if also ridiculous, entertainment that ended with an unbecoming and uncharacteristic whimper. If Herman Cain could, for a while, be thought a quarter-credible candidate, why could The Donald not strut upon the national stage as the star of his own bouffant opera buffa? Perhaps even Mr. Trump appreciated that saving the United States from itself was too big a task even for the Lion of Park Avenue. Or it may be that Trump was saving himself for a different, possibly more modest task: saving Scotland...

Responding to a growing outcry over conditions at its overseas factories, Apple said Monday that an outside organization had begun to audit working conditions at the plants where the bulk of iPhones, iPads and other Apple products are built, and that the group would make its finding public...

Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri called for the ouster of Syria's "pernicious, cancerous regime," raising fears that Islamist militants will try to exploit an uprising against President Bashar Assad that began with peaceful calls for democratic change but is morphing into a bloody, armed insurgency. The regime has long blamed terrorists for the 11-month-old revolt, and Zawahiri's endorsement creates new difficulties for the US, its Western allies and Arab states trying to figure out a way to help force Assad from power...

From the moment he left business for politics, the issue of abortion has bedeviled Mitt Romney. In 1994, as a Senate candidate, he invoked the story of a “close family relative” who had died after an illegal abortion and insisted that abortion should be “safe and legal,” though he was personally opposed. In 2002, while running for governor of Massachusetts, he sought the endorsement of abortion rights advocates, promising to be “a good voice” among Republicans, one advocate said...

With the weird blend of investment and helplessness that typifies kin, we’ve watched Whitney Houston die in front of us, slowly and unmistakably, for more than a decade. Now that she is dead at the age of forty-eight, found at the Beverly Hilton, we face a new and weirder blend: the grief you feel for someone you didn’t really know but are unable to pretend you weren’t tied to, and the awkward truth that they’ve met the end you expected...